Baridi is an exciting new Kenyan company whose vision is to help build ventures that can maintain themselves – even remotely – to catalyse wealth and create social impact within sub-Saharan African livestock value-chains to assure economic returns for food producers. 

Most of the region is starved of electricity with the power sector significantly under-developed in terms of energy access/installed capacity. The key value of Baridi – branded in the livestock sector as BARIDI – is to link markets and cold chain stakeholders with affordable, off grid low cost, solar powered cooling solutions. 

Catalysed by uptake from domestic users, renewable solar power has become a growing energy force on the African continent and political will is increasing with clean energy advances buoyed by various policy incentives, donor-backed schemes, and de-risking mechanisms. 

The meat sector itself comprises a complex web of interactions and actors from producers to transporters and processing plants to exporters. In Kenya alone 42% of livelihoods rely on pastoralism. However, the livestock value chain is neglected with a 30% post-slaughter meat loss through wastage, a situation replicated right across sub-Saharan Africa.

Traditionally the continent accounts for just 5% of the world’s beef, sheep, chicken, goat, and pork meat production, but many sub-Saharan African countries are ripe for a revolution in productivity that could help increasing global food demand. This provides attractive opportunities for investors, though making storage more efficient whilst also protecting the environment, improving smallholder livelihoods, and evolving more efficient modes of production to meet demand/encourage exports is challenging. 

Within this environment Baridi has amassed a track record and assembled a strong like-minded team to provide a 5kW standalone chilling service combining nanogrid and cold storage technology. A €353k seed round has been successfully completed from six national and international donor groups to set up and run three initial units within Kenya. The first on-site service has commenced in Burma market in Nairobi. 

Company strategy is to place units in commercial urban sites before an informed learning curve can afford service progression back out into the rural areas. Baridi will focus on scaling the livestock value chain using four different business models (pay as you store, direct sales, lease to buy & franchising) with the beachhead market consisting of selling meat chilling services into Kenya. This will be followed exporting services into at least five other countries; Tanzania, Botswana, Rwanda, Nigeria and Ethiopia. 

Regarding competition, Baridi is a first mover in the livestock market and the simple fact is that there are not enough players in the sector. There is room enough for many more players, but Baridi is carving out a specific branded niche to build a defendable position and scale within the livestock sector itself. In this regard Baridi is being mentored by Solarkiosk Solutions, a major operator within the solar service space in Africa.